The TV model has always been weird. It doesn’t accomodate word-of-mouth nearly as well as a video-on-demand model. You can’t say, “Hey, I saw this great show last night; you should check it out.” All you can say is, “Hey, I saw this great show last night; it’s too bad you missed it.”

That’s just one reason why they’re going to go down. But TV and other preexisting mass media have been mainlined constantly by whole generations of Consumers, so they have the inertia to make sure that they go down very slowly. I subscribe to a couple of NPR podcasts, even though they have a little advertising, just because they already have the radio model down, & dibs on some of the best talent.

Maintaining the public’s interest in television is going to be an increasingly challenging & frantic activity in the next few years, I predict. I never even noticed when I was growing up how the main product advertised on television is television– the other shows that are on, the next show (please please please stay tuned), the very concept of sitting in front of a TV. That powerful collective trance state is going to start to show cracks, and they’ll have no choice but to come over here to the internet and try to point the way back to TV, to shepherd us poor little lost sheep.

<3

Also…when *aren’t* you feeling frisky.